5/1/04
VIGILANTE JUSTICE
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Last night I dispatched my own brand of vigalante justice. And it felt SOOOO good. Lauren and I have been moving into our new apartment and so last night I finally broke down a bunch of our boxes and loaded them into my work van, figuring I'd throw them into the cardboard dumpster at my office rather than throwing them into the apartment's trash dumpster. This way, they could be recycled.

So I get to the dumpster and it is piled high with boxes that are still in tact. I mean HIGH. The dumpster was overflowing with these boxes that somebody had thrown in without breaking down, so much so that there were even boxes on the ground. There is a sign on the dumpster that clearly says to flatten all boxes. Well I was pissed at this point because now I had nowhere to throw my boxes unless I wanted to just throw them on the ground.

Looking closer at the boxes in the dumpster, I noticed a lot of them had the same brand name on them. We'll just say SMITHSON. So looking then even closer, I noticed that on many of the boxes was the address for a company in the same corporate park as my company. Seriously, several DOZEN boxes, all from the same company.

Well now I was REALLY pissed. Everybody who has access to a dumpster like this has cheated at some point. You get lazy and just throw a box in without breaking it down. But this one company, we'll call them BLARNEY MEDICAL had gone too far. I felt that hot fire of passionate creative thinking start to burn inside of me and a sly grin crossed my face.

I pulled all my boxes out of the van and placed them on the ground. Then I took every box that was still in tact that had a Blarney Medical address label on it and threw them into the van. After that, I grabbed all the boxes that didn't have a Blarney address label, but which had the same logo as the other boxes Blarney was receiving. So all the Smithson boxes went into the van too. I gave Blarney the benefit of the doubt and left any unmarked boxes in the dumpster. By the time I was done, the dumpster was half empty (or half full depending on your mood). I threw all my flattened boxes in, slammed the van's sliding door and drove away.

Our corporate park is kind of confusing and I ended up driving around in circles for about 15 minutes before I finally found the offices of Blarney Medical. My heart was racing. I knew that this area is patrolled by security, so I was going to have to be fast and have a story ready.

I jumped out of the van, threw open the sliding door, grabbed the boxes an armload at a time and deposited them in front of the entrance to Blarney Medical. The process took about 30 seconds and by the time I jumped into the van and sped away, there was a pile of boxes up to eye-level and about 3 deep blocking the only door into Blarney Medical.

I drove away,my heart pounding, my adrenaline pumping. I haven't felt this alive in awhile. It just felt so good. I know the Christian moral is to not seek revenge. Fortunately, I don't look at this as revenge. It wasn't like I dumped MY trash in front of their door. I merely brought back their unbroken boxes to give them the chance to rectify the situation. I considered posting a note on the door saying, "Please flatten boxes before putting them in the dumpster," but I figured that would be the step too far... I didn't want to push my luck that a security guard wouldn't drive by.

I'm curious whether or not they'll complain to somebody. What can they say really? It's their own trash. It has THEIR address labels on it. Are they going to complain to the landlord. What could he say? "You mean you didn't break down the boxes?" So... screw 'em.